France’s privacy watchdog just will not take no for an answer.
On Monday, the country’s data protection authority rejected Google’s efforts to limit how a landmark European privacy ruling may be applied worldwide.
That privacy decision was handed down last year by Europe’s top court, and allowed anyone with connections to Europe to request that global search engines remove links to items about themselves from queries.
Several European privacy regulators, particularly in France, have urged that this so-called right to be forgotten be applied to all of Google’s search domains.
In contrast, Google has argued that the privacy ruling should apply only to European websites like Google.de in Germany or Google.fr in France.
The standoff took another turn on Monday after the Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés, or C.N.I.L., the French privacy watchdog, said that it had rejected Google’s appeal for the ruling to be limited to Europe.
The country’s data protection agency said that limiting the privacy decision to just domains in Europe could be easily bypassed by individuals based in the 28-member European Union, which would nullify the court’s privacy ruling. The watchdog also said that once Google had agreed to remove the links, the company was required to apply the decision across all of its domains, not just those in Europe.
The regulator rejected an assertion by Google that it was trying to extend French control over how people around the world retrieve online information. Google has said that France’s efforts may lead other countries, particularly those governed by authoritarian governments, to try to gain similar control over global Internet access.
“Contrary to what Google has stated, this decision does not show any willingness on the part of the C.N.I.L. to apply French law extraterritorially,” the agency said in a statement on Monday. “It simply requests full observance of European legislation by non-European players offering their services in Europe.”
The watchdog said that Google must now apply the privacy decision to its global domains or face fines that could total as much as $340,000. Google was fined $170,000 last year for failing to adhere to France’s rules in a separate privacy case. The company may appeal any potential fine in the French courts.
Google said on Monday that it disagreed with the French regulator’s aim to expand the right-to-be-forgotten ruling beyond Europe’s borders.
“We’ve worked hard to implement the right to be forgotten ruling thoughtfully and comprehensively in Europe, and we’ll continue to do so,” the company said in a statement.
The French regulator has emphasized that it does not want to control how people around the world surf the web, yet Google and free-speech campaigners have balked at Europe’s attempts to spread the right-to-be-forgotten ruling to other jurisdictions.
In a blog post published in July, Peter Fleischer, Google’s global privacy counsel, said that no country should control the type of online content available in other nations. He added that such practices could lead to multiple countries’ trying to outdo one another with strict rules, which could eventually reduce all types of materials that are available online.
France’s efforts to regulate online privacy come as people in the country remain the most active in Europe when it comes to seeking the removal of online links about themselves.
So far, more than 66,000 such requests based on almost 220,000 online links have been submitted by people living in France, the largest figure of any European country, according to Google’s latest transparency report.